~ 12 steps for better living.

Monthly Archives: January 2012

One post on Step 3? Yuuup! That’s how it works. We make a decision and then we IMMEDIATELY get into action.)

So anyway, thanks to the University of Texas and the dear lord’s will for me…I spent the last several days penning out some pretty juicy inventory, and since we’re on Step 4, it’s a perfect time for me to share it with you.

Inventory (4th or 10th step) is meant to keep my house in order. That means that I don’t just shove down all the crappy things I’m feeling right now about getting rejected from yet another graduate program. If it’s burning me up inside, I have to take it to the paper. The pen is a mighty tool.

I always start inventory with a fear list, and I always do my fear lists the same way. At the top of a blank page I write, Dear God please help me be honest. Then I start writing, I fear (fill in the blank.) And I write I fear again and again until nothing else comes out. Here’s what it looks like:

I fear I will never find a professional home for my writing voice, and therefore, I will never be a successful ($$$) writer.

I fear that I will be an esthetician, doing facials on people who really don’t deserve to be touched by me, for the rest of my freaking life. (Note: I said, help me be completely honest, so don’t hold my grandiosity against me.)

I fear the future.

I fear that I will never find real financial security.

I fear that I’m not really as great of a writer as I think I am.

I fear that I am not enough.

I fear that whatever comes next will be scary.

I fear God’s will for me.

I fear being 40!

I fear dying.

I fear that JM will get a graduate degree before I do, and that he’ll be more successful than I am!!!

I fear failing, and that makes me fear trying.

I fear that God is busy and isn’t really paying attention to what’s happening in my world, and therefore, has maybe permanently screwed up my chances to be more educated.

Ok, that’s good for now. I start with a fear list because I am a human being who is driven, motivated, manipulated and eaten alive by fear. I need to get that on paper before I go one step further. When I’ve emptied that out, I start the inventory. I start it the same way I start a fear list. Dear God, please help me be honest. I’m resentful at (fill in the blank until nothing else comes out.)

Resentment actually comes from a Latin root meaning re-sentiment. So anything (negative) that I feel over and over again is a resentment and is worth looking it.

I’m resentful @ UT for not accepting me to their graduate program.

I’m resentful that I’m almost 40 and I don’t feel like I’ve found a professional home.

I’m resentful that I still, 11 years into my sobriety, feel like my worth is attached to what I do, what I earn, how I look, ect.

I’m resentful at myself for waiting until 6 weeks before the deadline to consider applying for a fully funded graduate program.

I’m resentful that figuring out my life feels like so much work sometimes.

This will be more than enough to demonstrate the power of the process. Here we go:

1. I’m resentful @ UT

Affects my self-esteem (I’m not good enough? Did they even bother to read my paper? Have they seen my recovery blog?) Affects my security (now that I did not get into grad school, I will definitely probably be homeless at some point, probably when I’m 70 and have no teeth left and can’t even get a job at HEB.) Affects my ambition (Uh, hello, do you know one famous [non-fiction] writer who doesn’t have an advanced degree?)

WHAT IS THE DEFECT OF MY CHARACTER GOD WOULD HAVE TO REMOVE IN ORDER FOR ME TO NOT HAVE THIS RESENTMENT?

This is a very important question. This is how I look at my part in things. I don’t always have to have done something to have a part. Sometimes my part is how I react to everything else when something happens in my life.

Well, God would have to remove my grandiosity for one thing. Also, my fear of financial insecurity and of the future. God would have to remove me thinking I know what’s best for me. God would have to remove my stubborn resistance to his (her, it’s) plan for my life. God would have to remove my tendency to turn everything into a big drama (homeless @ 70…a little dramatic please.) And most important, God would have to remove my fear of trusting God and myself.

Defects: grandiosity, fear, stubbornness, resistance, control, UNSS (unwilling to see that UT is just a spiritually sick organization, just like me, and that if there’s no hope for them, there’s none for me…bahahaaha! Just kidding, UNSS doesn’t apply to this resentment, but there are lots of resentments it does apply to!)

2. I’m resentful that I’m almost 40…

Affects: self-esteem, security, ambition

WHAT IS THE DEFECT OF MY CHARACTER GOD WOULD HAVE TO REMOVE IN ORDER FOR ME TO NOT HAVE THIS RESENTMENT?

Well… God would have to remove the grueling sense of urgency I feel about everything I do. God would have to remove the picture I have in my head of what 40 is supposed to look like. God would have to remove me thinking I know what god’s plan is for me, and how to best achieve it. God would have to remove my lack of gratitude for all the amazing things I have accomplished in life. God would have to remove the part of me that is exacting, demanding, harsh, derogatory and downright degrading..you know why, because those same attitudes I apply to myself get applied to everyone I love and care about, and I never want the people I love to feel judged in the way I am judging myself.

Defects: Grandiosity, unrealistic expectations, people pleasing (I would be so much more respected if I had a Ph.D) control, lack of gratitude, lack of humility, lack of compassion (for myself and others.)

3. I’m resentful that I still attach my value to what I do, what I have…

WHAT IS THE DEFECT OF MY CHARACTER GOD WOULD HAVE TO REMOVE IN ORDER FOR ME TO NOT HAVE THIS RESENTMENT?

Oh dear lord, now we’re getting to the meat of it. God would have to remove that terrible hole in me that thinks it can only be filled, I can only be enough, if I have enough, do enough, accomplish enough. It’s that fucking race inside of me that keeps me like a rat in a cage, constantly striving for others approval and recognition, and I’m here to tell you (and myself) it ruins every good thing in your life. God would have to remove my inability to just be a human among humans, my self-centeredness, my rigidity, my fear god and of life and of you and of me. God would have to remove my people-pleasing, my manipulation, my martyrdom. God would have to remove that little tiny seed way down deep inside that keeps telling me, you are not enough, you are not enough, fuck you, you are not enough.

See how it works? I won’t bore you with the rest of my inventory, but I will say that nothing is more important that this process. Because I’m alcoholic, I have to get down to causes and conditions. These were things I drank and used over. I don’t have that solution as an option anymore, so I need a new way to stay comfortable in my skin, and this is it.

When I’m done with this process, I have a list of defects, but what I really have is a better idea of who I am, and what I’m working with. And that’s really important, because an alcoholic, I’m packing a little something extra. This stuff I wrote down here is what lives inside my head, if not consciously, at a sub-conscious level where thrums steadily through my life, and it can inspire me to make some very bad choices. I can easily get lost in it.

I have a long and torrid history with both my mother and my now dead father. One of the things my mother must have said to me a million times in my life was, “you just don’t care.” In sobriety, as I wrote and wrote inventory, I was able to finally see that she was wrong. I am someone who cares very deeply (to a fault sometimes) about myself, others, and life in general. When you know who you are, you don’t have to own whatever else it is someone thinks of you. It’s a powerful gift.

Be kind to yourself today. If you’re full of junk inside, write an inventory.

Step 3 is simple, but addicts and alcoholics insist on complicating it. We make a decision, it’s that easy. The decision is to acknowledge that there is a power greater than us at work in our lives. Making the decision is an act of surrender (thy will, not mine be done.) By making this choice to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understand God, we agree to move forward in life by taking right actions and to leave the results to the powers that are busy organizing it all for us. We agree to embrace our dreams, our hopes, our desires…because the longer we stay physically sober, the more we can trust that those things are god-inspired. When the results aren’t what we want them to be, we may have a lot of feelings about it, but (and I find myself saying this over and over again in various situations lately,) our feelings are irrelevant. They don’t change the decision we already made. It is what it is, regardless of how we feel about it.

I didn’t get into graduate school…AGAIN! When I applied back in November, I made an agreement with my higher power that I would remain in acceptace of God’s will for my life. There’s nothing I hate more than when my will and God’s will for me turn out not to be aligned. Yet I am absolutely certain (after some 4,000 days of continual sobriety) that God’s will is ultimately better for me than mine. Just because I think it would have made me happy to juggle graduate school while starting a non-profit, raising a family, being a wife, working the program and attending to all of my other 10,000 responsibilities, I am aware in a vague foggy place that I might be crazy! I don’t always know what’s best for me…and I really really hate that sometimes, but it’s been true for me over and over since the day I stepped into this program.

Again and again I go back to Steve Jobs saying, we can’t connect the dots looking forward. I love that. We just don’t know, and it’s silly to waste any time at all crying over spilled milk, as the saying goes. But just because it’s silly, doesn’t mean that we may not still do it, after all, I’m just human! It’s totally ok to be a little irked with God sometimes. At our core we are human beings learning how to be humans being. We have been rescued from the terminal sentence of death and insanity in order to stay sober and help other alcoholics. As it turns out, I’m suddenly sponsoring a ton of people…people who just dropped into my life in various stages of Step 3 dilemmas. What is the answer for us all? It can always (and only) be found in the present moment.

In this moment all is well. This will not be the year that I find a professional home in a graduate program. Maybe next year, if I decide to apply again. Or maybe by this time next year, life will be unfolding in such a way that I realize graduate school was not the path for me (stay tuned!) Either way, I can only be present in today. It’s the only place anything can happen. I can be sit with my feelings (disappointed, a little depressed, a little in fear, a little pissed at God) but I have to stay in my reality. There’s a lot to do here. That’s the point for me of a sober life. I didn’t get sober to eek out an ordinary existence until I finally keel over dead of boredom.

I am trying (hello God, are you paying attention?) to build a life I’m excited to live in. That was never a part of my using story. When I was using, I was trying not to get arrested. I was trying to have enough of whatever substance it was to keep me numb 24 hours a day. I was trying to avoid the sense of impending doom that hung over me as I crawled out of my closet and into A.A. I was really busy! When I got sober, I suddenly had a lot more time on my hands. And what old timers taught me, was that it is my responsibility to use that time to be on the planet enjoying my life, contributing to the world around me, searching fearlessly for where I can be of service, and living life to the fullest. As it turns out, I’m really good at that! Pushing the envelope is my specialty. I think most alcoholics are like this. It’s certainly one (negative) manifestation of what we do when we try to drink and use ourselves to death. But there are many many ways of using this ambition for good…and they all start with Step 3, aligning ourselves with God’s will for us. When we “sincerely take this position” all kinds of incredible things happen.

Yes, it (sometimes) means falling in line with a plan other than yours. So even though today looks a little bleak knowing that no graduate program lies in my immediate future, I surrender, humbly, to that fact. Life on life’s terms. Period. And even though I will probably grumble my entire way through working on the website for my non-profit today, I will finish this blog post and do it. Because that’s what’s next on my list. And those are the doors that are opening for me right now dammit dammit dammit dammit fuck. And I can feel anything I want to feel about it all. I don’t have to like it. But my feelings, at the end of the day, are meaningless. And when I’m ready to move on and feel something else, I will. Feelings are magical indicators of where we need to do a little spiritual work (ego, control, fear of financial insecurity, grandiosity, lack of humility…oh, sorry, those are mine!)

If you think you can do a better job, then go ahead and sit on Step 3 for a while longer. Contrary to popular opinion, A.A. is not some cult that insists on brainwashing the independence out of you. You get to act however you want (just don’t drink!) But my guess is that if you consider the mess you have made of your own life (and one thing we know about newcomers is that they have just had the WORST year of their life–otherwise, they wouldn’t be sitting in A.A.) you will find Step 3 easy to swallow. By the time I got here (and many times since) I was so done that I gladly let it go. It really is the easier softer way. I used to envision surrender as kind of flopping arouund on the floor until I collapsed like a dying fish out of water (that’s kind of what it looked like as I was detoxing from drugs and alcohol.) But surrender these days looks more like stepping off a cliff. It’s stepping out into…I don’t know what, and trusting that there is always something there holding me. So if you’re new, or if you’re dancing around Step 3 for some over-complicated reason, let today be the day that you make like Nike, and just do it.

Alright, first things first. Because I don’t want to get any death threats over my recovery blog, and because I understand and respect the fact that Christ is a precious figure to many many people around the world, let me say that this post is in no way sacrilege to Jesus or religion. To fully vet our backgrounds in this department, JM’s family is mainly Catholic and Episcopal (I think) and I was born to a protestant woman who converted to Judaism in order to avoid the wrath of her mother-in-law and not be permanently exiled for being shikseh! My mother later became a born-again Christian (years after her divorce) and started burning Barbara Streisand albums in response to the threat of satanic messages being secretly contained on secular music. As you can imagine, (at the tender age of 9 years old) I was shocked, and also very confused! Later in life I was reunited with a whole slew of my Jewish relatives, and that’s where I picked up my mad Yiddish skills. Okay, here’s how JM makes peace with Jesus.

We were standing at the kitchen sink yesterday eating a healthy breakfast some toast loaded with butter and raspberry jam, when with a furrowed brow, he scratched his head (jelly eeking out the corners of his mouth) and said:

Maybe Jesus was one of us.

Huh? As in alcoholic?

Why do we have to take the words of Jesus so literally?

Mmmm…are you saying he inferred that he was an alcoholic?

I’m a child of god. I’m a child of the universal whole.

Ok. And?

Jesus broke off some good teaching, but so does Art.

Who’s Art?

From L.A., on skid row. The homeless photographer guy we hung out with.

Ooooh! I love Art. Agreed, Jesus is Krishna, is Buddha, is Art. He was a teacher.

Yeah. He was a teacher. Like Art. We’re all teachers. It’s just about how far we’re willing to go to carry the message.

The conversation went on from there but in the name of brevity, I’ll leave it at this. Yesterday, JM was able to channel his inner Jesus (and his inner Emmet Fox) in order to point out that as Fox would say, “There is absolutely no system of theology of doctrine to be found in the Bible. It simply isn’t there!” This goes back to yesterday’s discussion of Step 2, that we find numerous ways to come into faith, and once there, we have the option to just keep growing. People are essentially spiritual creatures (not necessarily religious ones!) At any given moment if we consider all the possible religions and religious perspectives on the planet, we are getting just a fragment of different ways to say the same thing…for example:

So if you’re struggling with Step 2, coming to believe that a power greater than yourself can restore you to sanity, you’re probably putting that power into a box, making it rigid and strict. Instead, try wearing the idea of a power greater than yourself like a loose cloak (vs. a straitjacket.) Simply wrap yourself loosely in the idea that you are not that power. That’s all you really need to know to begin. You’re not God! Once I accepted that there was in fact a power greater than Nina, my heart began to open to the teachers that were brought into my life. And in sobriety I learned that everyone, every single person with whom I have any encounter, is a teacher. Teaching me in just a word, a glance, an attitude, a phrase, a sentence, a conversation, who I want to be and who I definitely do not want to be. I can thank everyone I come in contact with, no matter how they treat me.

I give you that Jesus was pretty cool. He was a subversive you know, always at war with the ‘official’ powers and regime of his own country. They knew, just like the powers at large today know, that when people speak the truth, when they can access the truth, hold it in their hearts, become empowered and moved by it, it is the beginning of the end for the old regime. And that’s a lot of power.

Sometimes I’m inspired by something when I sit down to write (today it was an image) and my brain gets hooked on it and even I wonder…how am I gonna tie this into sobriety? I feel like I’m on some Reality TV show akin to Chopped (where the chefs all get a basket of secret ingredients and have to make something out of them.)

“Today’s writer’s basket is about Wind Power…you have 7 minutes to create a totally readable and enjoyable blog post about it…now go!”

So…here’s the thing about wind power. It’s renewable (duh) and it’s cost competitive to produce (especially since, like everything else, the turbines are produced overseas at the hands of incredibly cheap labor.) It’s the fastest growing renewable source of energy on the planet and it’s local..in other words your wind = your power.

But it’s not all roses with wind energy . The industry is incredibly over-subsidized (meaning too many tax breaks to make it of any economic benefit to anyone except politicians who want to rant about how much they’re doing to secure sustainable energy.) Wind turbines destroy ecosystems (I’m a little treehugger, sorry, but really, my treehugger mentality comes from a core belief that EVERYTHING affects everything. There is nothing that we do or that happens in isolation on this planet, at the micro or macro level.) Wind energy doesn’t really reduce our dependence on oil, since (and correct me if I’m wrong here) only about 1% of American electricity is oil driven anyway., and it’s hard to claim (yet) that wind energy is benefitting the economy since most of the long-term jobs it creates are low paid maintenance work.

Still, it has a lot of potential, doesn’t it? Especially if we can learn to really draw more power from it.

BAM! There it is…with 3 minutes left on the clock, I just found my link back to sobriety.

Where do you derive your power from? We know that in terms of our addictions, lack of power (why can’t I stop snorting drain cleaner?) is our problem.

The 12×12 says that by the time we get to Step 2, we’re kind of screwed. In Step 1, we admit we’re alcoholic (and trust me, once you admit that, your drinking will NEVER ever be the same. Try sitting in a bar having a drink with a head full of AA…ugh!) So I admit my life is a mess and now you tell me that nothing but dependence on a power greater than myself can help me. Fantastic.

I can get into all kinds of drama here about whether or not I believe in a power greater than myself–let’s call it God for the sake of simplicity. I may reject the idea of a god. I may have a very specific god based in religion. Or I may just think (as I did when I got here) that I wouldn’t want anything to do with a God that wanted anything to do with me. That, by the way, is the ultimate expression of self-loathing. Either way, the fact is that I need to just “resign from the debating society” (p.26) and stop bothering myself with deep thoughts about God. Sober alcoholics (and drug addicts) “tread innumerable paths in their quest for faith.” (p.27) I absolutely love that line. It lets me take a deep breath and know that there’s no wrong way to do it. As the 12×12 points out, it’s all about getting across the threshold. That’s what ‘We came to believe’ means. Once across, faith broadens, widens, deepens, and for most of us, it does so exponentially. Because you can’t have crawled out of a gutter and lived with the shame we live with, and then find yourself becoming useful, wanted, needed, depended upon…without somehow picking up a a little faith along the way. Even you will not believe who you become inside this journey.

Not dying was the highlight of my drinking and using, so I say that’s a win…right? Sometimes I’m so sarcastic that even I can’t tell when I’m being serious, and that’s kind of my mood today.

I don’t want to spend too much time recounting some of the more dangerous and deadly ideas that were shared at the newcomer meeting I went to last night, but here’s a brief recap: (and please note, there was a wet drunk in the room!) Also, in the event that anyone finds this offensive due to the “what we see here stays here, here here…” just know that I have disguised things to protect the innocent (and the guilty!) So, to the drunk we (as a group) said:

THE OPTIMIST

“This thing is deadly …uhhh…I don’t know. If you’re one of us, you’re just fucked (umm..ok, I’m reserving judgement at this point…are we talking tough love? It could go either way, BUT THEN . ..) Sometimes I think the ones who died when they were drinking and using were the lucky ones. But we’re here for you…yeah.”

THE REALIST

“You’re not unique. Every one of us has been exactly where you are (Great so far! But then a sharp left off the deep end...) I sat in exactly that chair 4 months ago and look at me now. Last week I was here sobbing. But I didn’t want to drink…I wanted to die, end it all, kill myself. (There’s something to look forward to, huh?)

Let’s call him SUNSHINE

Listen, no matter what, you’re going to feel better and better and better (mmm, ok, hard to predict where he’s going with this) If you stop drinking (you being the 40-year-old with sclerosis of the liver and a distended abdomen who is having bowel problems) just 24 hours and you’re going to feel better, so much better! And you’re just going to keep feeling better and better and better (he repeated this point a lot) That’s what happened for me!

Ahhh…sober drunks. You gotta love us for our eternal ability to take any person’s pain and make it all about us.

The truth is, if you’ve been around here for a while and you think the lucky ones were the ones who died using, you’re not getting it.

If after a length of sobriety you’re still trying to end it, you may want to seek some outside help.

And if you think that things get automatically better for every person who stops picking up…well, you’ve never been me. When I stopped drinking and using, things got worse…a lot worse, for a short while. Take my witty and charming personality and remove substances (back then) and you’ve got raw unleashed rage. Yuck!

That’s why Step 2 doesn’t say that the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous can restore us to sanity. It says we came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity (note that it also does not say we are restored to sanity at this point…only that we come to believe in the possibility.) It’s why it is so very important to think about the message we are carrying to the newcomer. It’s why I’m writing this blog…to remind you that this blog will not restore you to sanity…but the steps, now the steps are where the power is.

We work the steps for one reason and one reason only: TO FIND A WAY TO A GOD OF OUR UNDERSTANDING, or whatever your version of that is. The process of the steps begins to clear away the trash that is cutting us off from the sunlight of the spirit. It cleans the closet, yeah, and that’s good stuff. Because you may have some really bad moments in sobriety (we call that life on life’s terms) and you don’t get to drink over them. You may take some vivid and wild rides and things may get so good that you suddenly wonder if you were ever even an alcoholic to begin with–but you still don’t get to drink. There are a lot of reasons to drink, but if you have any reservation that drinking can still be your solution, you’re dead–and I mean that literally.

We don’t drink or use no matter what. I can’t emphasize that point enough. And when you don’t drink/use no matter what for enough days in a row, what you discover is that you live through it (whatever it is…your feelings, someone’s death, losing your job) and it doesn’t kill you. It’s called acceptance people, or WELCOME TO REALITY, and it’s the price we pay around here for the high cost of survival and the extraordinary opportunity to be rocketed into the 4th dimension.

One of things we are told we have to do when we start working the 1st step is accept our alcoholism. There’s a fabulous page in the Big Book (it used to be p.449, I think it’s p.417 now) that says, ‘Acceptance is the answer to all my problems today.’ When I was new, people were constantly telling me to read that page. Acceptance, acceptance, acceptance…

It used to make me really angry, because like most newcomers, accepting my addiction (or anything else in my life) was not high on my priority list and I found it difficult to see how acceptance was going to fix the fact that I had real problems…like being broke, like needing a place to live, like all the people who had thrown up their hands in desperation and walked out of my life. Since being new, I have sat in many meetings on acceptance, and I always hear it is always put (during discussions) into an emotional context. For example:

“I have to accept my alcoholism, but I don’t have to like it.”

“I am accepting success as it comes, but it feels uncomfortable.”

I had a sponsor when I was new (the nasty one!) who used to bark out that another phrase for acceptance was WELCOME TO REALITY. Acceptance is nothing more than being fully aware and present of what is real in any given moment. It is what it is. I don’t like that I worked for ten hours on a proposal for someone last week, putting aside all my other responsibilities and that they haven’t had the courtesy to call me back. SO WHAT? I don’t like it. But that has nothing to do with acceptance. I can roll around in that emotional attachment if that’s what I want to do. Sometimes I do that. But more often that not these days, I try not to have an emotional attachment to my reality…why? Because I have experienced that there is a greater power at work in my life and that everything is exactly as it is meant to be, whether I understand it or not.

It is what it is.

When you get there, it’s easy to work the 1st step. Here is the reality of my physical, financial, emotional, spiritual life today. Here is where it’s working. Here is where it’s unmanageable.

It is what it is. SO WHAT, NOW WHAT?

How you feel about reality is irrelevant (in A.A.). That’s a therapy thing. If you want to explore your feelings or dwell in your inner child and how you got to where you got, that’s fine…I have no problem with that. But it’s not A.A. Alcoholics Anonymous is a program of action. It’s the SO WHAT, NOW WHAT. Moving on…don’t get stuck…don’t stay here (in what’s unmanageable or in what you aren’t pleased with.)

Move on for God’s sake. And for your own. You can always come back to therapy, but for now, just act right. That’s it. It’s that simple. When I started really living in the idea that it is what it is, and I began to make acceptance a part of my daily practice. When acceptance becomes a spiritual tool (and it will, if you practice it) the natural next right thing is to ask ourselves SO WHAT, NOW WHAT?

“When you realize that there was never anything in the dark to be afraid of, you can laugh.” Alan Watts

What is God? God is the same thing you are…a void. As Alan Watts would say, total transparency, the ultimate space in which anything can happen. The realization that there is nothing to fear would also be a realization that we know nothing about God. That’s just a human word for something beyond our understanding. It doesn’t mean we can’t feel it. The feeling part is about vibration and energy. It’s a very real and measurable thing.

But there is no permanency here. There are no boundaries. We are a blip on the radar. There are waves of experiences that have come before us and unlimited ones that will come long after we are gone. Every wave has a crest and a trough, human labels we have put on things to help us understand them. Sound, light…they have already happened (come and gone) by the time you experience them. Everything you experience is already over.

Humans are obsessed with separation. We define ourselves in countless classifications: gender, color, race, religion, height, weight, degrees of success, education, income, possessions. It’s exhausting. Why do we do it? Perhaps it is our scramble to feel safer, to make sense of it all.

But I need to keep my perspective on life and on my sobriety like Watts’ description of Buddhism. The ultimate space in which anything can happen. It’s large, limitless. It doesn’t look like anything…not a box, not a circle. It’s not linear. It is infinite in possibility. The big question is are you enjoying it?

So, I just finished reading ‘Nickel and Dimed: On (not) getting by in America. It’s an old book. It was published in 2001, which means that the author’s ethnographic research was taking place in late 1999. For those of you who haven’t heard of this book or don’t know Barbara Ehrenreich, it’s incredible! It’s the story of how a writer goes undercover in the world of the working poor (people who make minimum wage in America) and what she discovers there.

This post isn’t long enough to sing the praises of this book in the way I want to, and this blog isn’t about social issues, like poverty, but at one point in the book Ehrenreich is living in Minnesota, conducting her experiment on whether or not she can get by working at Wal-mart and still have enough money to eat and pay rent. She realizes that despite working full-time, due to the fact that Wal-mart, like so many minimum wage employers, holds back an employees first check until they quit (ridiculous!) she has made on $43 in three weeks time. In case you’re wondering, this is the (not) getting by in America part. At this point, it’s case closed for her…game over.

There are some experiences we have that make the first step clear for us, and it’s the only step we are asked to do perfectly. I admit I am powerless. When you are living at a motel and they literally change the lock code if you don’t pay and you have made $43 in three weeks, you are powerless over what happens next. When you are sitting (somehow) behind bars, having racked up your 1st, 2nd, or 3rd, DUI and you’re wondering, how did I get here…powerless.

Lack of power was our dilemma. And I think that’s a tough concept for alcoholics and addicts, because as a whole, we tend to be very crafty people who are good at getting our needs met one way or another. Also, most of us like to spin things around in our head for awhile in an attempt (sometimes) to manipulate the data. What is powerlessness and what does it look like when it comes to addiction?

The truth is that it looks different for everyone. There are many places to get off the pain train (as a friend of mine used to call it in L.A.) and try a different way of living. But I think that whatever the external circumstances of powerlessness look like, the internal circumstances go something like this:

I no longer think I have a solution to my problem.

I have tried everything, and none of it has worked.

I’m out of good ideas (and bad ones.)

I’m willing to look outside of myself for a solution.

I recognize that I am at the center of all the disintegration in my life, that the only common denominator is me.

Alcoholism is a simple disease, but understanding it is baffling sometimes. It doesn’t have to be if we keep it simple and don’t turn AA into therapy.

I have an allergy (we can debate unnecessarily over what kind of allergy: physical, mental, emotional, spiritual) to alcohol.

Something different happens to me than happens to others when I drink (even others who drink a lot!)

I experience something that ‘normal’ drinkers almost never feel: the power of craving.

That craving becomes a mental obsession (insane urge) that drives me to very dark places and to do things that I would otherwise never do.

Inside me, there is a darkness carved by addiction that is so deep that only the power of something greater than myself can save me from it (although I will often try to fill it with just about anything on the planet that I think might change the way I feel.)

I am “driven to AA” and there I discover the “fatal nature” of my situation. In other words, I will chase the obsession to drink and use all the way to the gates of death.

When we can say and understand these things about our drinking, we are ready to move on, but the key to beginning a program of action in AA is that we have to stay physically sober, NO MATTER WHAT!

Okay, they don’t walk into a bar…but today’s post is about a Hindu goddess, and her name is Akhilanda. She’s the goddess of ‘Never not broken’ and she’s an amazing introduction into talking about the 1st step.

You know that feeling when you just woke up in your own puke or you suddenly realize that you forgot you mother’s birthday? They used to call it incomprehensible demoralization when I was new…but I don’t hear that term as much anymore. Anyway, you’re lying on your bedroom floor and you feel completely broken.

Well, according to the elephant Journal’s JC Peters, in that moment, you are more powerful than you’ve ever been. In her article on Akhilanda, she talks (from a Hindu perspective) about what we in A.A. call surrender, or the 1st step. As I was telling a friend in a meeting last week, I am the most powerful when I am completely broken. It takes that moment of brokenness to get me to give up all remaining hope that I have the answer to my problem. And then, in coming attractions, that’s when the a power greater than myself can actually have some wiggle room to work in my life.

It’s not the kind of broken that tears you down to humiliate you. It’s the kind of broken that tears you apart, and therein is Akhilanda’s (and the sober alcoholics’) real power. In pieces, we can begin to put things back together in a different picture…a picture that reflects more accurately who we want to be and what we want life to look like. Hopefully we do this with a mindfulness of aligning our ambitions with a Higher Power’s grand plan for our life.

In the myth about Akhilanda, she rides a crocodile. The crocodile represents our reptilian brain, but it’s also a powerful commentary on what we should do with our problems. Many people think the crocodile masters its prey with strong jaws that kill it…not so! The crocodile actually drags its prey into the river (or into the flow) and spins it senseless (until its broken) and THEN eats it.

If you’re sober today and you’re feeling broken or cracked, embrace that. Lean into it. Because the cracks are where the light flows in. If you’re sober today and you’re working really hard to become some vision of wholeness, release that. Let it go. We are never whole, and that’s a good thing. Because wholeness (by definition) is about limitation. When I am exactly what I’m going to be, I am automatically excluding everything I have yet to become. So again (and I hate this) there’s no destination.

Being broken is the perfect place to start over in our sobriety, because we have lost all expectation of what life is going to become. That’s the first step. It’s surrender. First we surrender to the fact that we are alcoholic and that alcohol makes our life unmanageable (waking up in your own puke, forgetting your mother’s birthday, fill in the blanks.) Then as we get a little freedom from that, instead of working the 1st step, the 1st step starts to work us. We recognize that there are many thing we are powerless over. There are many things that make our life unmanageable. This is how the journey of a few simple steps becomes the journey of a lifetime, and of limitless expansion.

It’s a new year, and I’m feeling a lengthy discussion of the steps (one day at a time) coming on. Happy Sunday.